80% of Our Clients' Keywords Now Appear in Google AI Overviews

If you've searched for a tradie, a clinic, or a local service business on Google lately, you've probably noticed something different at the top of the results page: a block of AI-generated text answering your question before a single blue link appears. That's an AI Overview, and it's rapidly becoming the first, and sometimes only, thing a potential customer sees.

At DigitalDoor, we've been tracking how our clients perform inside these AI Overviews whenever Google serves one for a tracked keyword. On the 8th of September 2026, we conducted a study that spanned over 2,500 tracked keywords for Aussie local businesses, covering national search terms plus campaigns across the ACT, Victoria, NSW, and QLD.

The result: when Google generates an AI Overview for one of our client's target keywords, our client is included in it 80% of the time.

That's not a vanity metric, and it's not an accident. It's the direct output of the proprietary content system we've built in-house specifically to win visibility in AI search, and it's a leading indicator of where local business marketing is heading.

1. What We Measured

We tracked over 2,500 keywords across our client base, trades, home services, health and cosmetic clinics, legal practices, retailers, and more, spanning national search terms and local campaigns across the ACT, Victoria, NSW, and QLD. For every keyword where Google chose to show an AI Overview, we logged whether our client's business was cited or referenced inside it.

The result held up across a genuinely diverse spread of industries: a funeral service appearing for "direct cremations sydney"; a pool cover manufacturer showing up across more than a dozen variations of "inground pool cover"; cosmetic clinics cited for "cosmetic clinic in wollongong"; trades and industrial businesses, electricians, plumbers, locksmiths, air conditioning specialists, appearing for service-plus-suburb searches, and niche B2B operators, from tiny home builders to school IT support providers, showing up for highly specific queries.

The pattern is consistent: it isn't only big-budget categories getting picked up. Local, service-area-specific, and even quite niche queries are being answered with AI Overviews now, and the businesses that have invested in the right content foundations are the ones showing up inside them.

2. Why This Is the New Frontier for Lead Generation

For the better part of two decades, local business marketing has been built around a simple idea, rank in the top few organic results or the Google Maps pack, and the clicks follow. AI Overviews break that thinking.

When Google answers a query directly inside an AI Overview, a meaningful share of searchers get their answer without clicking through to any website at all. Position one in traditional search is no longer necessarily the prize, being the business Google's AI chooses to cite, name, or link to inside the answer itself is. That citation reaches the searcher at the exact moment they're forming a decision, above the traditional organic results, and reads as an implicit endorsement from Google.

This changes what "visibility" means for a local business: it's a trust signal, not just a traffic source; it captures intent earlier, since many AI Overview queries are informational and shape the decision before the searcher starts comparing providers; and it's still wide open, because most local competitors haven't structured their content in a way that gives Google's AI systems anything reliable to cite.

Put simply: ranking well in traditional search results is no longer enough on its own. If your business isn't showing up inside the AI Overview, a competitor who has done the hardwork in capturing that customer intent will.

3. What Actually Drives Inclusion

Getting cited in an AI Overview isn't luck, and it isn't the same game as classic keyword-stuffed SEO. A few factors consistently correlate with inclusion: direct, well-structured answers that clearly address the customers intent; genuine experience and expertise signals (E-E-A-T); strong Google Business Profile data, reviews, categories, services, Q&A; consistent, locally specific content, since suburb-and-service-specific pages outperform broad ones; and structured, crawlable content with clear headings, FAQs, schema markup, and semantic passage chunking.

This is also why AI visibility can't be bolted on after the fact. It has to be built into how service pages, blog content, and Google Business Profiles are written and maintained from the ground up, which is exactly why we built our own content management system around it.

4. Our Proprietary Content System, Built for AI Search

Most agencies are still writing content for the search engine of five years ago and hoping it happens to work for AI Overviews too. We took a different approach: DigitalDoor has developed a proprietary content management system purpose-built to structure, produce, and optimise content specifically for how AI search engines select and cite sources.

Rather than treating AI visibility as an afterthought bolted onto a traditional SEO process, the system is built around it from the first draft; a structured production pipeline that runs every piece of content through a consistent process engineered around the signals AI Overviews actually draw on.

Content gap analysis, customer intent analysis, E-E-A-T analysis, and importantly, AI specific optimisation built directly into the content workflow, so pages are structured to concisely answer the exact questions AI systems are summarising; consistent, at-scale execution across every client page and site.

This is exactly how a study of over 2,500 keywords across dozens of local businesses nationwide ends up averaging close to 80% inclusion rather than one or two standout results skewing the number; and direct integration with our clients' Duda websites, so content moves from strategy to a fully published, AI-search-ready page without the delays that let competitors catch up.

It's this system, not a one-off campaign or a single well-optimised page, that has produced the consistency in the results above. When 8 in 10 of over 2,500 tracked keywords, across dozens of different trades, clinics, and service businesses nationwide, show a client cited inside the AI Overview, that's what a repeatable, purpose-built process looks like in practice.

Conclusion

If you're a local business owner, the practical takeaway is this: your competitors are already being cited in AI Overviews for searches your future customers are typing right now, or they will be soon. The businesses that treat AI visibility as a core part of their marketing, not an afterthought, are the ones capturing the leads while it's still relatively uncontested.

It's now a standard, non-negotiable part of how we handle SEO, AIO and Google Business Profile management for every client. The businesses getting cited today are setting themselves up to be the default answer for years to come.

 Want to know whether your business is currently showing up in AI Overviews for the searches that matter to you? Get in touch with the DigitalDoor team, we'll show you exactly where you stand.